8 core PC's

[guitar131]

I've been looking at the Tyan dual Xeon Motherboard that supports 2 quad core processors. Anybody running anything like this, and would protools even recognize all 8 cores in the playback engine? PCaudiolabs.com is using this motherboard in its 8 core systems, but I wasn't sure if people using protools were going with anything like this as of yet. I just spent a bit of time cruising the "core2duo" thread and didn't see anything about it. Maybe it's a cost vs. performance issue at this point, but I was just curious.

[Jon E.]

Originally Posted by guitar131

I've been looking at the Tyan dual Xeon Motherboard that supports 2 quad core processors. Anybody running anything like this, and would protools even recognize all 8 cores in the playback engine?

See the last few pages of this thread, there are a few folks running PT with dual quad core AMD Barcelona chips on the Tyan S2927A2NRF motherboard.

Originally Posted by guitar131

Maybe it's a cost vs. performance issue at this point,...

No question, the Core 2 quads are still the cost/performance winners. But my understanding is this has more to do with registered memory access times than the chips themselves. Jon E.

[Herkimer]

So is an investment in the 8-core Xeons a wortwhile investment in the future... Will ProTools and operating systems catch up to utilize the potential... or is it likely that the Xeons will be passed over for "next gen" similar to Vista really being somewhat passed over? Please speculate!

[Jeff_C]

I'm one of the folks using an 8 core AMD Opteron (dual quad core) setup with PTLE. ProTools does take advantage of all the extra processing power. In fact, I've pretty much quit using low latency monitoring - even on nearly finished songs with lots of plugs active. I am able to leave the buffer setting at minimum for songs with 30+ tracks, a good number of auxes, master plugins, etc. without issues.

I'm not sure what I would do if I needed a new machine right now. There is a significant difference in plugin counts between Opterons and similar spec Intel quad core chips. My understanding is that since Opterons use registered memory there is time lost there.

Where the Opterons excel, though, is power consumption and heat. I don't have a machine room so my PC is under the desk and it needs to be silent. I don't think I could do that as easily with the current Intel processors.

For those of us who already have Opteron Socket F systems, there may still be a little growing room. A 20% faster, lower power quad comes out later this year for Socket F (samples have already been shipped to OEMs). There's also a Socket F based 6 core Opteron that AMD plans to ship in late 2009.

You asked for speculation, Herkimer. There's nothing more speculative than a technology company's estimated shipping dates for a new product.

[sunburst79]

What will be interesting to see is if the return of Hyperthreading with Nehalem results in a usable performance boost for PT now that its coded better for multithreading. With the early benchmarks pointing to 25+% increases almost across the board it should be good. The early benches are saying the base 289.00 i7 920 series chip spanks the current 1499.00 QX9775.

What we dont know is Will it run PT? and what effect will the new cache hierarchy have on PT. PT seems to love the currently huge caches on the Core 2 stuff.

The current 8 core stuff both AMD and Intel uses registered memory and its a great deal slower then the faster DDR desktop memory. The new upcoming Intel desktop stuff has amazingly huge memory bandwidth so there is hope the the new server chips using the new memory controller will more than make up for the slower registered RAM. The slower RAM may prove to be even more of a potential bottleneck. Regardless it should perform MUCH better than the current crop of server based multi processor stuff.

AMD will have Denab and Shanghai coming out and that should offer some performance boost for any compatible boards. They may even throw the the FX74 platform owners a bone. Some FAST 8 core machines using un registered RAM would be nice.

Unless you going to build a current Quad I would wait till the new stuff drops and see how that works out. I absolutely would not build a new Intel or AMD 8 core server based machine until we find out if the new stuff is compatible.